Salesforce Heroku Purchase to Widen Customer Net

Salesforce Heroku Purchase to Widen Customer Net

9th Dec 12:07

Salesforce.com has signed a deal to acquire Ruby application platform-as-a-service Heroku for £134m.

The Software-as-a-service provider is set to be purchasing Heroku, the cloud application platform that uses open source programming language Ruby, to widen it's customer net to include more developers. The multi-tenant platform hosts customer applications and will benefit from regular platform improvements.

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.

"Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fuelling this growing community," he added.

"We think this acquisition will uniquely position Salesforce as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

Ruby has become the leading development language for writing next-generations apps that are collaborative, and delivered in real-time across mobile devices. Founded in 2007, Heroku now powers more than 105,000 apps.

The deal is set to be completed by end of January 2011 and has been approved by Heroku's board of directors and stockholders.

The Acquisition comes after salesforces' rocky start to the week as microsoft offered companies that are currently customers of Salesforce or Oracle's CRM services a cash bonus if they switched to Microsoft's own Dynamics CRM Online.